George Clements and Stephen Range
George Clements and Stephen Range may seem like an unlikely pair.
Clements is a 71-year-old ex-military retiree and Range is a 23-year-old student with dreams of being a basketball coach. Over the past few years, however, the two have become like father and son.
Clements and Range were brought together by the Safe Families PLUS program, an initiative of Bethany Christian Services. The program pairs young people between the ages of 16 and 21 who are aging out of foster care in Dauphin or Lancaster county with older adults who serve as mentors, providing support and helping them adjust to adulthood.
Range first met Clements through Angel Elicker, outreach coordinator of Safe Families PLUS. Elicker facilitates every aspect of the mentorship—from matching the youth and adults to monitoring the relationship from a distance.
Their relationship was tenuous at first. Range needed time to trust Clements, and Clements and his wife and two daughters had to patiently encourage him.
“He wasn’t very trusting,” Clements explained. “Not that he was dishonest, but just that he’d had such a bad go with life, it was hard for him to trust people.”
Gradually—very gradually—that changed.
“We got relatively close in a standoffish way, because, like I said, that trust thing kept coming up,” Clements said. “We got pretty comfortable, and then he would disappear, and I wouldn’t hear from him for two or three weeks, and then he’d pop back up and text me.”
Life Skills
Since the inception of Safe Families PLUS by Regional Director Mark Unger in 2010, more than 55 young people have been referred to the program.
Five mentor-mentee teams, Elicker said, have been successfully “discharged” and are now in the 18-month tracking period that Bethany implements.
“It definitely has its challenges,” she said. “It’s frustrating when the kids don’t want to even give it a try, or, when they’re starting to build that relationship, they end the relationship instead of really trying to invest some time and energy into it. You have to know, though, coming in, that it’s a tough population, given their life experiences.”
Elicker believes that Safe Families PLUS (the “PLUS” stands for “Providing Lasting Unconditional Support”) is effective because it fills a gap in services. As children age out of the foster care system, they often have a lack of adult support, and this is the only program she knows of that provides needed services.
“These youth have had a lot of losses,” she said. “They’ve gone through relationships that have been disrupted, and so, because of that, they don’t really have the necessary support system to help them learn life skills.”
The youth are more likely to be homeless, incarcerated, or, in the case of the girls, pregnant at a very young age, Elicker said.
“They just have a lot of harder challenges—that’s a tough age to begin with,” she said. “Then you add, you know, having experienced abuse and/or neglect, being moved around a lot, not having that support system. So needless to say, it’s very hard for them.”
Anyone over the age of 24 who can pass the necessary background check is eligible to be a mentor, regardless of their other interests or qualifications.
“We are looking for a wide range of different people, because it’s going to take different people to mentor different youth,” Elicker said.
There for You
For Range and Clements, most aspects of their relationship are everyday activities—getting dinner, watching a football game together.
When Range’s car broke down, he called Clements to pick him up. Currently, Range is pursuing a degree in physical education and working six days a week, so his communication with Clements mostly takes place via text message.
While Clements doesn’t like texting, he says that it works best for Range.
“I completely understand where he’s coming from,” he said.
Over the past two years, Range has become the son that Clements never had. His two daughters “look at him as a brother” and ask about him regularly.
“I’ve got three sets of parents,” Range said cheerfully. “I’m fine with that.”
Bethany Christian Services, headquartered in Michigan, provides a variety of other social services, including domestic and international adoption (it is the largest adoption agency in the United States) and pro-life pregnancy counseling.
As Safe Families PLUS continues to grow (an expansion to York County is planned), Elicker is focused on finding more mentors and on fundraising, including events last month with both the Harrisburg Senators and Lancaster Barnstormers.
“We’re also working on, Stephen is joining me, in creating a community impact team,” she said. “We’re really looking to bring in a wide range of people. First, they should have a passion for these youth and a commitment to serving them, but also a wide range of skillsets to help us grow this program.”
In spite of their hesitant start, Clements and Range are both glad that they committed to Safe Families PLUS and foresee a lifelong relationship.
“This is whenever you need a person, or need that family, they’re there for you,” Range said. “They’re there to listen or to contact or whatever.”
To learn more about Bethany Christian Services and Safe Families PLUS, visit www.bethany.org.
